This morning I was checking my Google Alert feeds.  I have several set up for various interests, like "winston-salem arts" or "forsyth county business" and I also have alerts set up for tracking blog searches for similar terms.  This morning I came across a listing for a blog that sent chills down my spine.  Essentially it threatened some people at a local institution with severe physical harm and it did so by naming them specifically and providing their home addresses so I thought it needed to be taken seriously.  I'm not going to go into any more detail than that because I don't want to give the threatened folks any more angst than they have already experienced.  I called security at the institution to give them a heads up and they gave me an email address to send them the URL of the page containing the threats.  I heard back from them about an hour later and they said that the page had been found by someone else last night and that the threatened parties had been alerted.  I can't tell you how relieved that made me feel.

But here's the point.  The people who were threatened could have found the same information if they had an alert set up for their name because their names were used specifically on the threatening page.  Even if the threat ends up being a false alarm they will have known about it even if someone else hadn't warned them.  Of course this only happens if you're threatened by name online, but there are other practical reasons to set up an alert system:

• Someone might be saying nasty things about you on a message board.
• Someone with your name might be doing nefarious things, and if they are you want to be aware of it so you can let people know it's not you. 
• Documents that you might have thought were private somehow end up online.  At least you'll know about it and maybe you can take action to have them taken down.  
• A friend posts pictures that have you in them and tag them with your name when they upload them. You may not have your friend remove the pictures but if you're uncomfortable with your name being attached to them you can ask them to remove the tags.

I think you get the point.  Anyway, if you want to set up an early warning sytem for yourself it's easy and free to do with Google.  Simply visit the Google Alerts page and follow the easy prompts to set up the alert.  You can set up the alerts to be emailed to you as they happen, which means any time your name appears online you'll get an email, or you can have all the alerts compiled and sent to you once a day or once a week.  Here's a helpful tip: use your full name in quotation marks, like "jane smith", because if you don't you'll get an alert for everyone with your first name and everyone with your last name.  By putting both names in quotes you can cut down significantly on the number of "false positive" alerts you'll get.

One last thing: it's kind of fun finding other people who have the same name as you.  I've found that there's a high school baseball player in Oklahoma with my name (seems he's pretty good too), and there's someone else here in North Carolina with my name.  I'm going to have to track him down some day.